George Konrad - A Guest in my Own Country

István was more theoretical than I and had a more sensitive and radical morality than my own. He was a revolutionary, while I am conservative by nature: I prefer to let things be. My worldview was eclectic, and I did not adhere to any doctrine. Flitting about and refraining from headlong commitment, I could always correct my excesses the next day. Everything István said had an intelligent beginning, middle, and end. If I took a stab at something and he liked it, he would make an approving click with his tongue. He formulated every problem as if speaking to himself.

“This Revolution,” he said to me at the end of October 1956, as we stood holding machine guns on the student national guard truck, “is not only against Stalin; it has no use for Lenin either.” I was not the least shaken by this statement. By that point István had run through every conceivable issue based on an analysis of data he had smuggled from the State Planning Office and on his experience in the countryside.

“The only benefit of emigration is that I’ve got hold of a copy of Kierkegaard,” he wrote to me from Oxford. What came after the defeat of the Revolution, a slightly less-communistic, more bourgeois communism, was something István did not find particularly tasteful. No one could be homesick for that! Had he not emigrated, he might well have hanged. If that kind of thing was to my liking, I was welcome to it.

István pretty much knew all three volumes of Das Kapital by heart, but capital itself left him cold. He was found dead in his bed in March 1960, a doctoral student at Trinity College. Gas poisoning, signs of suicide, no note. The previous night he had returned to his rented flat from his brother Pali’s birthday party. He had moved out of College lodgings, which he regarded as a rubber-walled sanatorium and where he had had a servant. The housemaid called the police. He was buried in Oxford. The Budapest Esti Hírlap printed a small obituary on the last page. Not long ago someone said he had it on reliable authority that István had had “suicide committed on him.” He was the best mind of the young post-1956 Hungarian diaspora, which may have given rise to the statement. Pali looked into the matter, but the source had gone silent.

Some time in the seventies I traveled to Berettyóújfalu with my children and our American cousin Tony, Pali’s son. We cut a path through the man-tall weeds to the family plot, where Tony cried out, “Jesus Christ! I’m standing on my grandmother!” It was Aunt Mariska’s marble grave. My daughter Dorka, tired of the graves, wanted to swim, so we sent her down to the Berettyó. The water smelled like pig manure. One of the cooperative stables was emptying its wastewater into it.

We walked the length of the town. The single-story middle-class houses on the main street, the homes of vanished Jews, stood gray and peeling. I drank pálinka in the railway bar. Everything was as it had been forty years earlier except that the hansoms were gone and the restaurant had become a bar. On the train an elderly Gypsy had given his son a slap for suspecting his father of stealing his money. The boy put up no defense, only cried and vowed to kill him. “I cannot strike my father, but I can shove a knife into his throat.” A policeman with a German shepherd and a truncheon appeared on the scene. “Jesus fucking Christ! Why don’t you respect your father? Put down that knife, and don’t you be stabbing anyone on me here in the train. You’ll get it back in Budapest.”

“It’s so real!” enthused Tony.

“Father feels most at home on trains like this,” my son Miklós noted somewhat acridly.

Until 1948, when I was fifteen, I would regularly visit my parents’ house in Berettyóújfalu. After that my father’s hardware business and house were taken over by the state and my parents moved to Budapest to be with my sister Éva and me. From then on only letters came. They came from the local Party secretary to my university, saying that my father was a bourgeois and not merely a petit-bourgeois, meaning he was a class enemy, meaning I was unworthy of a diploma granted by the authority of the people.

Later, in the seventies, I went to the village of my childhood on several occasions to visit my friend Tóni Baranyi in the psychiatric ward of the hospital, which was run by a superb doctor, István Samu. Many of us had had great respect for Tóni’s sharp mind and sardonic sense for the heart of any matter. He had his own room in the hospital, where he could smoke and read as he wished, and he sometimes put on a white robe. He could leave the hospital at will, but still required Dr. Samu’s fatherly support and the friendship of a doctor couple. He helped work up patients’ case histories through thorough questioning, thus playing the role he had filled in other mental institutions, the inmate prince who in intellect and learning towered over patients and doctors alike. His talent as a writer was evident primarily in the musculature of his formulations: his words hit their mark the moment he opened his mouth. At home in Pesterzsébet he would mostly just sit in his armchair and stare out of the window into the street at the similar working-class house opposite or read the only book in the room. He gave away all books once he’d read them. Having no desire for possessions, he was finicky only about his trousers. Otherwise he was no dandy. He would go down to the garden gate several times an hour to see if anyone had rung. He was ready to deal with any intruders, by force if necessary.

Tóni Baranyi always felt better after seeing his doctor friends in Berettyóújfalu, where he would go to the beach and have a swim in the Berettyó. The time I visited him, we had an animated conversation in the former Lisztes Restaurant. I was the only guest in the upstairs hotel, where I found the Gypsy boy who played piano at the restaurant in the evening playing chess with himself. Tóni and I sat in high-backed chairs in the restaurant’s large main room, digging into wild boar sausage and garlic cabbage, drinking a heavy red wine, and watching a row of identical, well-nourished, self-confident peasant faces engaged in singing. The heavy-set men wore dark jackets, white shirts unbuttoned at the top, and rubber boots for the mud, and gripped their glasses with dark-skinned, thick-fingered hands. At one time the corner table had been reserved for the town notables; now, in the seventies, it housed detective types, the city and county police department having moved next door. They were telling jokes, jokes that were good if the commanding officer at the head of the table laughed.

Facing me, a young lady with a touch of a mustache brought a forkful of kidney and brains to her lips. Truck drivers waiting for the main course popped pork-crackling buns into their mouths to go with their beer. Some pried them apart with curiosity; others skipped the fuss and bit them in half. Dollops of sour cream glimmered on the stuffed cabbage, which, as it crumbled under the knife, revealed that it contained more rice than meat. The man who looked after the local dam was served a small vat of bean soup in which cubed beef swam in abundance. Soon tiny roses of fat glittered on his droopy, graying mustache.

Then the rectangular bottle of marc brandy came out, and a glass or two slid down the gullet, leaving not a trace. The flypaper hanging from the lamp had done its job and was completely covered. A double bass leaned against the wall under a color photo of the Gypsy band’s leader, who had been playing here for years, his muttonchops running down to his dewlap in a wave. Now he was grinning, the violist earnestly chewing his mustache, and the cimbalom player using the paprika shaker with scientific precision as he polished off his roast beef and fried onions.